Point & Shoot
by planetblue
Summary: Two people. Two houses. One field. Sometimes anger is so much better than sorrow.
1. Chapter 1

**Chapter 1**

 **~Bella~**

* * *

The sirens went off at midnight.

The wind had been blowing up from the south ever since the sun rose, flattening the fields as it howled across the prairie. It began with a creep of noise that snuck in through the tiny cracks between the window sills and the panes, rattling the glass with a high-pitched whisper. By evening, that sly, whining sound was demanding to be heard—screeching through the screen door, moaning through the floorboards, wailing like a baby left out in the open.

Crying for a mother who had left it there on purpose.

Abandonment issues, that wind.

I knew enough about those sounds to recognize them.

The television had been nothing but gloom and doom all day. Those tight-lipped newscasters in their polyester and their pearls, helmet-haired and cement-faced, as they delivered the end of days. Oddly detached, handing down their warnings as though talking to paper cutouts instead of living, breathing people.

Get your flashlights, they said. Get your pets and your bottled water and spend the night under the stairs. Crouch down in the basement. Huddle up in the bathtub. Just wait it out, they said. There's nothing to do but wait. Wait and maybe beg or wish or pray the world doesn't flatten all around you. Hope the eye of the storm looks down and sees you in that bathtub with your cat and your anxiety and your dinky little flashlight against all of that great big swallowing darkness and that it passes you by.

I killed the television with a twist of the dial and curled up in my bed as evening fell. The knowing never helped. I still twisted my sheets around my legs. Still wrapped my throat around a raging ball of fear while I waited for that familiar wail. The wind had me coiled up in nervous cotton sheets and itchy wool anxiety.

By the time the sirens finally chimed in, I was crawling out of my skin.

The newscasters had told us to stay safe. Stay inside.

I went outside instead.

In a nightdress and nothing else because I didn't understand self-preservation, or maybe I just didn't care about it.

The screen door was slapping and the sky was green, dismal emerald clouds boiling down angry and hot from an indigo sky. The air was humming, and the wind was still blowing, bellowing now—less abandoned baby and more trapped, bloodied animal desperate to get free. I was no match. It tumbled me like an empty plastic bag right up against the old wooden fence at the edge of the overgrown yard; air smashed out of my lungs, and my fingers dug deep into the rotten wood, lodging splinters beneath my nails.

I clung to the fence, buffeted by the wind, hanging on for dear life.

It really was beautiful. That sounded so ridiculous, but it was the truth. The colors and the wailing and the way the grass laid flat against the ground. The way my hair blew sideways, and my skin crawled with electricity, prickly and tight. The sputtering rain hit like ice-cold needles; the evening sun swallowed whole, nonexistent, as though it had never even been there at all.

Flashes of lightning illuminated a wind monster eating its way across the prairie, ravaging the flatlands with teeth and claws.

Starving fingers reached for the earth, trying to make a landing.

The lights in the house went dark; the power wiped out. A group of cows floundered by, running ahead of the wind, eyes rolling in terror, their bellows of fear lost in the caterwaul of the storm. The monster was yanking at my nightdress, tugging it from my shoulders and pushing it tight against my skin, pulling hair from my head and tears from my eyes. It pawed at the shingles and gnawed on the sagging porch. The shutters were clamoring, the ivy was being torn from the siding, and the screen door wouldn't last long, the way it was banging around.

The storm could take the house for all I cared. It could have it all.

It could take the creaky, stone-smooth floorboards and that terrible, peeling wallpaper. The refrigerator that groaned like an old man with a bad case of gout. The bed I was born in, the one that creaked every time I breathed or blinked, much less rolled over. The lock on the front door that was too rusted to actually function. The flaky paint and the creaky windows.

The stain on the carpet in the hallway… the storm could definitely take that.

It had been seven days. Seven days, twelve hours, and fifteen minutes. I was still waiting for her ghost. Seven days and I was still walking around that spot of the carpet on tiptoes. I still held my breath with my eyes shut tight until I was safely on the other side, pressing my back up against the wall to slink around the edge as though it was actually a hole in the ground that led straight to China. Or to the hot molten center of the earth.

Or Hell.

The storm could take the carpet. And the stain. And the genetic mindfuck.

Good riddance.

One last giant roar of air knocked me flat on my back, the monster's mouth descending around me. I scrabbled to my feet and ran for the house, the shelter of the porch. Bolting headlong through the grass as that fork-tongued tempest took a long, slow lick up the underbelly of the forlorn Midwest.

* * *

 **Hey there!**

 **HB and PB here…**

 **If you haven't checked it out yet, the wonderful ladies at TLS hosted our sneak peek, and it'll give you a bit of a timeline of how this whole thing came to be, and almost not be! This story took four years to complete, through the ups and downs of real life, and we're really excited to finally share it with you.**

 **We will be posting the first two chapters on our personal accounts, HoneybeeMeadows and planetblue, plus our combined one, BlueMeadow. Then we will ONLY be posting on BlueMeadow, so make sure you find us and follow!**

 **www dot fanfiction dot net / ~ bluemeadow** **(Don't forget to take out the spaces!)**

 **We could not have done this without the incredible group of women who have dedicated their time, love, and effort to us. We'll keep it brief here, but expect us to get really sappy over them at the end.**

 **LayAtHomeMom is our pre-reader, Hadley Hemingway and CarrieZM are our betas, and we were blessed to have such a stellar group of minds and hearts working alongside us. These three amazing women had to come together as a team, and many many MANY details had to be ironed out to find the best way to attack this project. They accomplished this monumental task seamlessly and with gusto. Thank you all for your patience, friendship, grammar skills, and insight. Our gratitude towards you three is beyond measure, and our words of love feel completely inadequate.**

 **We must also mention Mina Rivera, who made our banner. We are in love with it, and commend her for pleasing both of us.**

 **Enough rambling.**

 **We hope you enjoy this journey with us, and thank you for reading!**

 **HB &PB**


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2**

 **~Edward~**

* * *

They say home is where the heart is.

Well, I had no heart, and this wasn't really my home.

But I thought maybe I'd try to fix one of those things.

The faded pink-red walls around me held shadows of missing picture frames. They mocked me, screamed at me to cover them, but I had nothing to share. Certainly nothing I fucking wanted to, not from what I had packed in the boxes I'd shoved deep in the attic. Paint would suffice or maybe an artist's print or some tacky velvet Elvis—some shit like that.

In my former life, I'd go out and create something new, something beautiful, but that thought quickly left me. I had no desire to try to figure out what that "new" would be.

Besides, there were bigger things to worry about in this place than decor.

This place, this white house grayed from age and life, with its damaged clapboard and rusted hinge shutters—it fucking knew it had a sucker in me. Its old-world charm and the surrounding desolate stretches of land said I was its owner, so I bought it right then and there, hoping it would give me something to do now that I didn't do… that.

I wandered around the floors, taking note of what I would fix until my stomach growled, reminding me I hadn't eaten since the rest stop five hours ago. All I had was some canned goods, so I heated some soup in an old saucepan. It was hot and burned my tongue when I gulped too fast from one of the china bowls that lived in the cupboards, the chip in the side telling me it had as many brushes with life and death as I'd had. I was happy to have the marred bowls and set of cracked cups to use.

Besides the ghosts in the attic, I owned nothing, and nothing owned me, and I liked that.

I _chose_ that.

Wandering onto the porch, I tried to find the calming sound of a bubbling creek I'd been told existed on my property, but the breeze was rattling wind chimes that clanked and hid any other sound. I knew those were coming down as soon as I had the chance. I didn't know the house or the wind chimes' owners, didn't know why they chose the ones they did—a lighthouse, a rusted one of a tea kettle with spoons and forks for pendulums—and that was okay. I didn't need to know. I'd picked my first home from a list of five pictures sent my way by email instead of house-hunting like normal people. Rose knew me, knew I needed something to fix that would occupy my mind and my hands, and she found it. Moved me and my pathetic amount of boxes in her Jeep by herself in one trip. My whole life fit in a damn Wrangler with the top down.

Even though I didn't get to meet the previous owners—an elderly couple carted off years ago to a place that would take care of them until they eventually died—I liked the fact that someone _had_ been here a long time. They'd lived here forever, had babies here, possibly on the maroon couch that sat in the front room. I wondered if I'd ever use that area because who needed a "front room" anyway, but fuck if I wasn't happy I could spend two nights in a row in there if I wanted to. In the same damn place.

The only thing I felt compelled to hang, a crisp American flag with its fifty white stars, white stripes, and red gashes, went up as soon as I'd found cord sturdy enough to keep it stretched across the paint-chipped pole jutting out of the soil at the bottom of the porch stairs. It was an impulse purchase in a gas station, the same place I bought the soup.

It flapped outside in a wind that was too quiet. A wind I wasn't used to. This wind was calm, peaceful. The kind laughter rode in on, not the hot kind that carried screams. I watched that flag and thought about why I bought it because you don't _have_ to own one, but now that I did, I let it fly. Even if it burned a hole in my gut each time I looked at it.

I stared at it all afternoon as the wind blew it steadily higher, not from war, not from people waving it above their heads as they celebrated or protested, but from an eerie presence that crept in as the air grew thicker. I thought to take it down just in case, put it with the boxes up above, but family and "honor" and brothers in the ground made me showcase it like the fucking country tells you you're supposed to. Besides, maybe the rain would wash its corrosive meaning away.

I was still on the porch an hour or so later when the wind picked up for real, and I listened to the rustling and crackling from the vast field of corn and weeds that made up my backyard. The constant, monotone din was a foreign sort of lulling sound that hadn't reached my weary ears in a decade. It almost made them hurt like when you ascend in an airplane, and the pressure builds and builds until you can't hear anything at all BUT the silence pressure creates. Taking another pull on my beer and tipping the creaky, wood rocker back, I watched the gray clouds roll in. They were relatively tame to my eye, unlike the brown dust and debris clouds that eat you.

Fucking catastrophe clouds that I knew so well.

The storm was turning into something big, and I welcomed it. The not-quite-there-yet rolling thunder mixing with the whispering fields soothed me, and when the first drops hit, I held my hand out from under the covered porch, testing their velocity. I followed my hand with my tongue, like a child, wanting to taste what pureness was. It wasn't the taste of rain mixing with despair or poison, and I thought of maybe getting a barrel to collect such perfect water in, to do something farm-like, but I didn't know what that might be.

When the lights blinked and the house threatened to lose power, I went to bed. Exhausted by myself, lulled by the howling wind and angry rain falling on the tin roof. I lay there wishing for sleep to come like the dead who filled my dreams.

* * *

 **Mad love to LayAtHomeMom, Hadley Hemingway, and CarrieZM for making us pretty.**

 **Enjoy, and leave us your thoughts!**

 **HB &PB**

 ***This story will continue at: www dot fanfiction dot net / ~ bluemeadow**


	3. Important Note About Point & Shoot

**Hey everyone!**

 **HoneybeeMeadows and I are thrilled by the response we've gotten for our first collab! We're so grateful and love that you're loving it!**

 **Just a reminder that we will ONLY be posting the rest of the story at:**

 **www dot fanfiction dot net / ~ bluemeadow**

 **If you have trouble finding it, PM one of us and we'll help you out!**

 **xoxo HB/PB**


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